Monday, February 5, 2007

I blame Katie. She knows how competitive I am. I'm a firstborn, for God's sake. It's genetically programmed. But she still had to tell me she had a blog.I know, I know. She tried to keep it from me. For months I was blissfully unaware. But then she caved, and she told me, and now I am in the first circles of blog hell.First of all, I have to figure out how to make my blog cooler than hers, and since hers is pretty mad cool, and since she is far more computer-literate than I am, and since she is tall and that just helps with everything in general, I have millenia of work ahead of me and at best scant decades left to live. I don't know how to do anything. I have to learn it all!!But we might as well forget about all that, anyway, because I don't have any time for that. Nor do I have time for eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, acknowledging my loved ones, or earning any money. Because there are too many blogs out there. One leads to another, and another, and another...and then you find a good one, like Crazy Aunt Purl* (I don't knit, as you know, but this woman is hysterical!), and you have to go right back to the beginning of her blog and read everything she's written right up to the present.And it's not just blogs, either, of course. People have links to other cool sites within their blogs, so then you have to go there, too. Catster. Have you been there? OH MY GOD. Save yourself. Don't go there. I don't know why you'd listen to me; I didn't listen when I was warned, and I went there. And now I have no life away from this computer.Farewell, cruel world. I live in Blogtown now.*One of the things I need to learn how to do is make references like this into links. On the other hand, that's what Google is for, right?

Sunday, February 4, 2007

My best friend is a blogger. I've just found this out. She had been one for some time before finally confessing it to me. I'm not sure why. I've read her blog and it seems in no way inappropriate. Maybe she didn't tell me because she figured that having discovered this, I would immediately have to go out and make a better blog than her.

Well, duh.

Or maybe she did tell me before and I don't remember. That's entirely possible. It's even entirely likely. I'm 50 years old and suffering increasingly from CRAFT*. I've always fancied myself a bit of a wordsmith; at least, ever since a high school teacher once told me I wrote "pretty well", I've taken that to mean I'm Hemingway or something. That and the fact that my children endlessly mock me for saying things like "mucilaginous" when any normal person would say "gluey". But now my nouns are deserting me like a sinking ship. All the other parts of speech seem content to remain. I have endless verbs, adjectives, and conjunctions at my disposal still. But the nouns…ah, I miss the nouns.

But I digress. Having discovered my best friend's secret bloggage, I naturally decided that I must also blog. Firstly, I must figure out how to do this thing. You see, I am not exactly computer-savvy. Oh, I work on one daily. I can word-process to a fare-thee-well. I can also fairly reliably check my email. But that's about it. My bloggy friend -- let's call her Katie -- directed me to the link on her blog that would take me to where I could create my own, and that seemed quite straightforward. But oh -- it wants a Google address. I don't have one of those. Well, if I go to the Google homepage (see how I tossed out that word homepage like I had a clue?) it will surely tell me where I can acquire one of their addresses. Well, it didn't. Not that I could see. Back to the create-a-blog page, and it turns out I don't need a Google address at all. Any old address will do, on any old slummish side of town. I am such a moron.

So the blog is created, at least in its most basic form. But what will I blog about?? My bloggy friend is a zealous knitter and many of her entries centre around that. Not only do I not knit, but I am increasingly concerned about losing this friendship because of my disconcerting tendency to have hysterics every time Katie forgets herself and utters the words "Sock of the month club" in my presence. She doesn't take it well when I do this, but seriously. I know all you knitters out there will be on her side. But I'm sorry: even if there are such things as "ear wax of the month club" or "pictures of Myanmar of the month club", I wouldn't think those are any more funny than sock of the month. (I'm really sorry, Katie!)

Isn't it nice that on the internet we don't (yet) have to be politically correct? Otologists and Burmans can send scathing comments to me about my disparaging their of-the-month clubs, and I don't have to care. Just don't start ragging on my noun of the month group or there'll be hell to pay.

But anyway. What are my interests? What blogging community can I feel a part of?

I am interested in having a great many more servants than I do, which is none if you don't count my husband and children, the first of whom would bitterly tell you he definitely is one and the latter of whom have rejected this role of late. And by "of late", I mean since they were about three and decided it was no longer fun to bring mommy stuff. And as I said, I'm 50 and I did not have my children late in life, so it's been awhile.

So what else? Um…um…oh, God, I'm so dull! Well, let's get serious here. I am interested in cruising. In a ship, that is, not for sailors or internet porn. I have done a fair bit of it, but not so much that I would feel really legitimate being part of a community of hardcore cruisers. I am interested in cats, but I only have two and I seldom take adorable pictures of them, because although I'm sure they do adorable things every bit as often as the next cat, they consistently never do when I have a camera in my hand. If I have a camera pointing at them, they just close their eyes and think of England. So I think that excludes me from contention in the serious cat blogger community.

For that matter, even if I did take pictures of them, I have no idea how to make the pictures go from my camera onto my computer. Everyone else who lives in my house knows how to do this, so I don't have to. I suppose they'd tell me if I asked, but they'd roll their eyes. I hate it when they do that.

So I suppose I am forced to be Seinfeldian and make this a blog about nothing. It will be an evolving blog. Or not. Maybe it will be a blog that simply whimpers its way into the (unphotographed) sunset. We'll have to see.

Because really, you know, my number one interest I gave away in the title of my blog. It is an embarrassment to me, but the fact is the thing I am most interested in, aside from my variously servile husband and children, is…punctuation. Spelling more than that, perhaps, but Spellchick was taken as a blog name. I love spelling, punctuation and grammar. I am the most unbelievable geek!! My only comfort is that I know, based on the astounding number of copies sold of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss, that I am not alone. There are others, like me, who will come close to having an aneurysm every time they see "it's coat was red" or "beet's for sale".

But I'm not going to talk about that now, because this is enough and more than enough for my opening blog. Here I am.

About Me

I’m a fiftyish lady with a semi-retired husband, two grown kids, and two bossy cats. I’m a cocooner who enjoys working from my home office, reading and fiendish crossword puzzles, but I also love traveling by cruise ship (which I have done often but not often enough!) My primary activity is searching the world for syntactical simpletons and punctuational nincompoops so that I might smack them upside their heads. If you don’t know the difference between its and it’s, go away now, before I find you.